My Love/Hate Relationship With Gwyneth Paltrow

Once upon a time, The Gloss editors discussed how they felt about Gwyneth Paltrow’s newsletter, GOOP. They debated such salient points as whether anyone wants to live in a castle like a princess (yes) and whether it’s affected to call Billy Joel “William Joel” (undecided).

But today, as I discuss my own love hate relationship with Gwyneth Paltrow, I’d like to take a look at a few additional points.

First things first: why I hate her. To not alert you to the fact that I’ve written about this extensively in the past would be unfair, so let’s look at some of those posts to begin with:

Gwyneth Paltrow once sat around with Stella McCartney and a female CEO of Facebook and discussed ways to make your – “your,” in this case, being “a mom’s” – life easier.Her advice ranged from hiring a full-time nanny to having fresh food delivered straight to your house (who has time to shop?) to having a team that makes your schedule for you. As you can see, these are in fact wonderful time-saving tricks. They’re also only applicable to the approximately .1% of people in the world who can afford them.

Gwynnie invested in a company that makes some sort of hippie bullshit health drink, and then schilled it as a hangover cure in her newsletter. This is not “advice.” This is blatant, woeful conflict of interest.

She attempted some sort of co-opt ofcrossover into country music, on the grounds that she once played a country singer in a movie and, while filming said movie, ate a bunch of friend chicken, of which she then promptly purged her body. This would not be so troublesome were the lyrics of her one-hit wonder song not built around the notion of being “country strong,” i.e. raised on the hard realities of country life, which is not really the way that Gwynnie grew up.

These are a few of the reasons that I have grown to hate Gwyneth Paltrow, which basically boil down to the fact that she always seems to be trying to relate to groups of people who are not like her in any way, and in fact live much more difficult lives than she ever has or ever will.

But here’s where I get a little caught up in my own web of hatred. Because as much as she’s not showing any signs of changing her irritating ways, Gwyneth Paltrow also doesn’t seem to give a fuck what anybody thinks of her.

And that’s really impressive, because lots of people hate on that bitch.

Lots. Of. People.

Why, Gwyneth Paltrow has probably provided as much fodder for snide internet blog posts as Sarah Palin. She’s just such a fucking easy target. But not only does she not ever talk about her haters publicly (that I know of), she doesn’t let us them stop her from doing anything risky, or that might end in ridicule. (I mean, I suppose it’s possible that Gwyn is so surrounded by yes-men and women that she really doesn’t have any idea how much the internet loves to rip her a new bleached asshole, but that doesn’t seem likely.)

So, she knows that haters gonna hate, and she still puts herself out there. She still sings country songs. She continues to publish her abominable newsletter.

But more than any of that — and I think this is when I really began to get conflicted about Gwyneth — she raps. On national television.

Do you remember what I’m talking about? Gwyn went on “The Graham Norton Show” last year, and the host asked her if it was true that she’s a big fan of 90’s gangsta rap. She said yes, and then Gwyneth – a 39-year-old, lilly-white rich California girl who went to Spence – proceeded to bust out the first verse of N.W.A.’s “Straight Outta Compton.”

If anything should have caused Gwynnie to crawl back into the gilded, 20,000-square-foot, above-ground hole that she crawled out of, it would have been the repercussions of that single moment. But as a seasoned Gywn hater, I think I speak for all of us when I say that we were so stunned by her behavior that it was impossible to eek out even so much as a “WTF.”

And by stunned, I should say, I mean impressed.

It takes an extraordinary amount of balls to put yourself so very, very far out there. By way of comparison, all I can really offer is that as a blogger, I probably take about .001% of the shit that Gwyn takes, and I’ve been known to let mean comments drive me behind (metaphorical) file cabinets and consider staying there for the remainder of my career.

So for Gwyn’s ability to not give a shit what people say about her, to keep doing her own thing, and to persevere in the face of adversity, I fucking love her.

I love her, in other words, for not caring about the ways in which I hate her.

Love the article. HATE HATE HATE the new font size for all the articles. It makes me feel like I’m blind and my eyes glaze over too quickly to finish reading, so I skip around a lot to avoid long paragraphs. Please go back to the old font size.

Amy

Agreed on all fronts.

Rosie

Do you have any idea how shallow this article is? I can’t believe the efforts people go through to express hate at a celebrity. There is something psychotic about the whole thing.

Pepper

Yeah—why do we even waste our time hating on some over-pampered celebrity bitch who doesn’t even care that we hate them? Coz it’s fun, that’s why. Gwyneth, call me—we’ll have some cup-a-soup.